


Circumambulation

by hitlikehammers



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Character Study, Hell Yeah Science Proves Soul-Bonds, Interpersonal Neuroscience, M/M, Mutual Gaze, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-29
Updated: 2012-03-29
Packaged: 2017-11-02 17:17:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/371457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>The phenomenon of mutual gaze proves extraordinary in that, in a single act, it manages to activate all major centres of the brain.</i> Predictably, Sherlock cannot help but test the evidence. It may, in fact, be his undoing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Circumambulation

**Author's Note:**

> Because obviously, reading through my neuroscience journals inspires me to write Sherlock fic. That’s normal, right?

His heart is racing, thrumming—faster than the thrill of the chase, the tension of the Game, the lust attached, interwoven with The Work; quicker and more insistent, more unforgiving than running, _tearing_ through the rain-slick streets after a suspect, after a witness, a clue, a crime—to prove a point. In this moment, his heart feels as it’s never felt before: like the ventricles have turned vengeful and the atria primal and they’re pulling, violent, against one another until one wins or they all fail and Sherlock’s entire body comes apart because this, _this_ is something altogether new, something never meant to be touched by the likes of him. This is danger and folly and irrationality for all that it feels concrete, inescapable. This is madness in its cruelest, most intrinsically-blessed form. This is freedom inside shackles, and this is his own fucking fault.

Curiosity. He blames curiosity, the selfish mistress—the one thing that never fails to convince him, to his simultaneous frustration and relief, that he is _human_ , quintessentially so: consumed with the need to know, to parse and discover and comprehend based upon his own observations, his own experience of something being quantifiably, verifiably _true_. The words only needed to be acknowledged, really: to be processed and the potentialities envisioned. The result, he fears, was simply inevitable.

_The phenomenon of mutual gaze proves extraordinary in that, in a single act, it manages to activate all major centres of the brain._

The very idea is thrilling, so simple; the research is still preliminary, still largely unclear, but the concept, the simple _idea_ of it, the enormity, the perfect syntonisation, the symphonic resonance of everything following in tandem, just so—the hard drive functioning at maximum capacity, the Palace lit in full: he couldn’t leave it, couldn’t grace such a notion with less than what it rightfully deserved.

He knows John’s gone through the research, cursorily or otherwise; Sherlock located the article in question in one of his medical journals, the ring from John’s morning tea (not later, the circumference is too large for the cups he uses later in the day) marring the cover. John will be familiar with the theory, the evidence, the experimental data. John will understand.

Regardless: John is the only possible option. John is the only partner that Sherlock’s ever had.

In _anything_.

So he’d prepared himself: read the references, the reviews of the literature, the papers and proposals and every scrap of data he could amass on the subject. He’d sat across from John and straightened his spine, relaxed his shoulders and inhaled deeply into the nasal cavity, allowing the oxygen to sit, settling long, restless in his lungs before he blinks, releasing, exhaling from the space between his lips: rhythmic, steady.

It’s on that very inhale, though—in the still and interminable space between—that he realises he _cannot_ prepare for this: a precipice he’s never quite approached before, a fall to an abyss that he has never measured, cannot fathom. His pulse gives him away, in that empty space; their eyes haven’t even met, John’s still got his closed, and yet Sherlock’s nerves are _en pointe_ , his muscles taut, and the heart is no exception—the beat of it echoing, reverberating shrill like a drum, a conductor’s baton calling order: calling, and yet flagrantly disobeyed.

His mind is buzzing, the blood circulating, the neurones firing and the thoughts surging forth; he is fit to burst, to _breaking_ , and they’ve not even begun.

Dear _god_.

Sherlock studies the shade of John’s lashes, the silhouettes they cut against the cheekbones, the way they play above the fine lines etched in his flesh and he thinks about the words, the printed text, black-on-white; the examples, the studies, the proof of the very theory he’s testing, _they’re_ testing.

_Mutual experience of trauma. Shared grief. Mothers and infants._

_Lovers._

Sherlock swallows around the unforgiving pressure, the tremulous _thump_ at his throat; John’s eyes open without preamble, and Sherlock forgets what he logically knows, and swears in a place he’ll never admit to, that the world tilts to a new axis in the moment John’s gaze meets his.

The sensation, at first: the _experience_ of it is fascinating, the affect of it ominous and chilling, utterly unknown. Sherlock sees things that don’t exist, that could never be deduced or observed from any eyes, let alone from John’s, under any circumstances possessing any modicum of sense: Sherlock sees the ocean and the heavens and rain refracting traffic lights; the night sky and broken glass, certain kinds of flame, bruised skin, the reflection of light through skin at higher wavelengths, the appearance of blood as blue. John’s eyes are open, open and they barely waver, simply stare and stare and _see_ , and Sherlock cannot, will not, _can_ not remove himself from being the seer long enough to imagine what’s being seen, to wall himself off or so much as entertain what revelations pour forth through his own two eyes. He ponders the medical, the clinical gaze—that Foucaultian _clinique_ —and he wonders how John, so full in just _looking_ that Sherlock fears he cannot contain what seeps into him, what drenches and holds his very _cells_ in these moments as they slip; he wonders how John practises medicine, how he maintains any distance when his eyes yawn and attract and consume so intensely that Sherlock has to grip at the edge of the table between them in order to fully remember that he exists as something separate, distinct and defined on his own.

His heart is a mallet, still: the hammer of a gun and it fires, and he takes the impact and feels the holes whittled slow, blown fast through all the things he’s thought and been with every moment, every fraction of an instant that passes in which he can’t look away, can’t give up the experiment, the trial as lost because for every hidden truth he uncovers, surrenders here—for everything he witnesses and gives away that is unattached and unadorned, unhindered and unencumbered by trivialities in this space of perfect, honest, being; _L'Être et le néant_ —he is certain of one thing, absolutely _one thing_ in the entire cosmos, in the stretching, gaping field of existence at its core.

In the stare, the look: caught and pinned by this Lacanian _gaze_ , Sherlock’s mind—his _mind_ —is like the goddamned _sun_.

Infinity is drawn suddenly, effortless in the footpaths of his own consciousness, in that moment: he knows all things, and knows that what he cannot know is not lost to him, that nothing is ever lost. He vibrates with it, on the inside; he can feel the movement of a single fragment of cognition as it travels and builds and gains momentum in the process of its own becoming, and it is enough to drive something in him, something central to his selfhood to its very knees; enough to sting behind his eyes as he refuses to so much as blink, refuses to risk breaking this terrible magnificence, this utter, fragmented wholeness—this inarticulable mess. The chambers of his heart resonate within the chambers of his head, the rooms inside the Palace of his mind and it is exquisite: harmonious, melodic and twisted and everything he is and isn’t and wishes and loathes, and his blood plays across the strings of his psyche, the bow poised and flowing, moving, crafting _masterpieces_ , the likes of which he has never heard before.

And he’s breathless with it, even he can’t deny it: he’s _breathless_ , he’s broken and remade and he’s _more_ than he’s ever been even as he’s less: naked and vulnerable and trembling; he’s fucking _trembling_ from the very bones of him, in the marrow, more violently than withdrawal, than rehab and detox combined, and he couldn’t have gripped the focus wheel to study a specimen, couldn’t have held on to a needle before it met the vein, couldn’t have so much as opened a nicotine patch and slapped it to his skin, or swallowed a sip of water without choking. There’s nothing for it, not a damned thing; he is _nothing_ inside this strange new world, this drop of existence that exists in the most dynamic stasis he’s ever envisioned, sameness and boredom and dullness and anything but, _anything_ but—stretching at the edges, all tension at the surface and never breaking, never bending when Sherlock’s pulse surges, a battering ram against the boundaries; not when his breath stutters, should shatter the spell encompassing them, by rights, and yet it holds. They hold.

They _hold_ , and he is _everything_ in this world, this sphere; John is everything and he is everything, and there is no _difference_ , no line drawn to divide.

The simple fact that this realisation, this understanding on its own does not destroy the still, does not disturb the tenuous thread that binds: that fact alone would inspire awe in even the blackest of souls, Sherlock believes this, and it is damnation, it must be; damnation to the only thing that will ever be deserving of being called divine.

And impossibly, improbably, inexplicably—poetic, filled with _sentiment_ and yet _absolutely true_ —Sherlock can see the pulse of John’s life, his blood in the sclera, the subtle trill of the iris, of colour and minute vessels tracing lines upon the white: Sherlock sees John’s heart, the ebb and flow, the way the muscle moves and contracts, the opening and closing of valves and the improbable journey of fluid through him, in him, _all_ of him before the shock comes again and there’s another beat, immediate, so swift and yet so staid, so steady and constant and unwavering compared to Sherlock, whose own chest is sore with the speed of his pulse; Sherlock, who is chaos—always—even to John’s most lawless, most entropic order.

Sherlock is every contradiction, ever complement; John is everything, and Sherlock is everything _but_ , everything _in_ : totality. Unrepentant. Complete.

And he _is_ the sun: he’s the chaotic, blinding, restless burning _sun_ and of course the earth doesn’t revolve around him, that was unimportant, deleted because it simply wasn’t true, because Sherlock’s caught in some other orbit, some separate trajectory, uncharted and unlooked for and unbound and unbidden, all before this moment where he’s caught, suspended and glowing from the inside, lighting the night with colours and shapes he’s never known, never dreamt of knowing, had never been given cause to care.

He doesn’t know what to do with it, with any of it, but John doesn’t look away, and Sherlock’s mind is a supernova in the dark, and his heart’s drawing strength, stamina from something outside of himself, letting it go on thundering inside his chest, inside this stare that seems stronger than steel, heavier than lead or guilt or death, and it’s nonsensical, all of it: it’s unconscionable and undeniable and unbearable and unimaginable, unfathomable that Sherlock could ever go back, could ever walk away from what he sees in this, what he knows and senses and understands inside this vortex, this beautiful absurdity—some exquisite form of loss, of insanity and purgatory and renewal all at once, blinding and above; beyond sight, beyond precious _observation_ and on to a knowing that transcends all the things Sherlock had ever thought to want or fear, because this is pure desire, this is sheer terror, and it is everything and nothing and the void in which they come together and ignite.

His heart won’t stop thrumming with a force he can’t conceive, rattling at his ribs until the sheer velocity proves too much, unassailable. Of course he leans forward. Predictably, he is mirrored, matched by the eyes he can’t abandon, wouldn’t leave. It is obvious, in it’s very essence: gravity always takes its course.

Always.

And their paths, he suspects, were always plotted thusly; it is only natural, in the end, that they collide.


End file.
